I guess you all remember that I’m blogging here in part because I cut 35% of my body weight, right? Along those lines, here’s where I’m at with my latest approach to staying in shape.

I decided to give a name to what’s working lately: The MDC.

(I really like this acronym because it’s my own initials. That’s all.)

First, some terminology:

What is a dirty cut?

A “dirty cut” involves eating low-quality, junky food while also cutting calories. This means weight loss, but with possible complications like higher body fat, etc.

So a “clean cut” would mean cutting weight while eating healthy food.

What is a Moderated Dirty Cut?

Moderation: Keeping something within reasonable limits; not excessive or extreme.

A Moderated Dirty Cut is a dirty cut which also meets these requirements:

• Requirement 1: The subject has identified that they have more motivational energy toward weight loss practice when it’s done dirty. For example, they are extra motivated because they get to eat more of their favorite junky foods, even in ridiculous amounts.
• Requirement 2: The subject is generally OK with also adding in some balance with healthy foods. This is not an over-the-top dirty cut, except on certain days or occasions. So: Some meals will be really healthy and this person is not outright attempting to destroy their organs.
• Requirement 3: The subject is getting a lot of exercise, good sleep, and is able to attack stressors A-OK in their day-to-day life.
• Requirement 4: The subject generally knows where their stats are. Their blood pressure, their blood work, etc. With all that in mind, a cut like this ought to be alright given their health status and history.

So that’s my MDC concept so far.

Since I’m Test-subject Zero, here’s my report: It’s working for me, and I passed my goal weight by 2 lbs. in about half the time I thought it would take, with a recent weight loss of just under 10 pounds. That’s why I went back and studied my moves and gave it all a name.

First, it integrates my background-ESFP dynamic, Se and Fi. Se is the objective-sensory-focused psychological process saying “GO EAT THE BIGGEST FRIGGIN DONUT” and Fi is the subjective-emotional process that says “I wanna eat what I wanna eat, and it ain’t protein powder, and I don’t care about your measurements.”

Another big part of the reason is that it’s working because I’m learning. I get free dieting-energy from study, analysis, and the general concept of the AOAEI Loop.

Finally, I’m getting energy bonuses from writing my own manual.

There are other elements I’m also folding in from my last mega-cut, like active measurement and invoking the intuition to see things coming (Example: I foresee a spontaneous end-of-week party tonight; I will skip lunch and become a clever prophet of forthcoming calorie expenditure opportunities!).

I would fold this all into a master system, but I really want it to be modular and flexible for now, so I’d rather spell it out separately from the MDC.

Anyway. Fun stuff. It’s nice to be in the mood to do some cutting again. Sometimes if I’m not in the mood (wow, Fi, thanks, I guess) I really, really have to work hard to be interested in changing my weight again. There are a LOT of things in life that are A) super important and B) super interesting, and C) way newer to me than weight loss.

Filed in: Dieting /18/ | Goals /52/ | Energy /120/ | Sensation /40/ | Fitness /31/ | Control /110/

I was reviewing an old blog post today and found yet another typo.

Back when I didn’t write that much, or that often, I had this “typo sense.” I feel like I was really good at spotting typos. I sometimes wondered how things could have been so poorly edited! One little typo could throw off an entire work…

At the same time, I was a little bit jealous of typo-makers. You know? People who just barrel through their writing, proofreaders be damned! I’d watch them and wonder: Why can’t I do that?

This dichotomy—typo fix, or typo flourish?—was tucked neatly into my subconscious with many other dichotomies until just recently.

Nowadays, I find myself happily making typos. I’m becoming that barrel-writer.

And it bugs me. But only a little bit.

I am pretty sure that back then, I would have happily exchanged the “typo-conscious mostly-reader” title for “typos-be-damned mostly-writer”.

There’s just nothing like the feeling of needing to dump so many ideas and concepts into a page that words themselves are equally satisfying and annoying. It’s like I’ve found a new form of breathing underwater, and some of the bubbles burst while heading to the surface. It’s fine—enough of them make it up there that the existence of life is plainly evident.

Still, to those of you who are really bothered and can’t fathom why people can’t proofread: I hear you, and can identify. I try to fix ‘em when I find ‘em.

What made the change possible

I had to ask myself: Why? What’s changed that made typos something about which I care less than ever?

I mentioned this before, but I believe it comes down to audience.

Previously, whenever I’d start a blog I would write for others. Like a performer. I’d guess that this is an issue for a lot of INTJs out there.

Eventually I learned to write for myself. Just me. And like I posted before, this blog is mostly a cherished subjective experience. I do write about what people want to read sometimes. But that mostly never worked for me.

I used to be able to tell you how to create and write a winning blog, one that ticked every box. But now I realize that there was a good reason why I never took that advice myself: My blog needed to start with me, not with “blogging,” whatever that was.

With that part straightened out, and with the work underway, it may not have appeared too blog-like at first, but it was sure up and going, and hard to stop at that.

Filed in: Productivity /119/ | Essays /52/ | Thinking /70/

In the role-playing game of life, the typical INTJ can take advantage of a wide variety of important bonuses. Here are three of my favorites, related to manual-reading and manual-writing:

Bonus Example 1: I Read the Manual

Yep, and on this team, you’re probably the only one who did. Good going! Give yourself a hefty bonus on tasks requiring deep expertise and perception, general efficiency, and leadership tasks requiring the type of leadership adulation and reputation points which are awarded based on knowledge.

Take a role bonus in any team that rewards success in these tasks.

Take an additional career bonus in any field that rewards success in these tasks.

Bonus Example 2: I Rewrote the Manual

Damn. You took it one level deeper. Even though there was a manual already, you rewrote it to make things easier on yourself and those around you.

After all, who needs a 20 page Table of Contents? Your version can be skimmed quickly to find the key knowledge points that will matter when things get difficult. Take a general efficiency and broad-knowledge bonus.

Take an additional team & career longevity bonus, as your manual-keepership makes people want to keep you around longer.

Bonus Example 3: I Wrote My Own Manual

Whether you authored a completely new approach to an existing system, or authored a new system and happened to write a manual: This ain’t easy, INTJ or no. Take a bonus on tasks requiring Deep, Arcane, or Forbidden Knowledge. You’ll also have access to high regard from otherwise unimpressed players and NPCs.

The Inventor and Mad Scientist roles are well within your reach. If your character has some charisma, they may have access to the Cult Leader role…or maybe they just want to start their own new and powerful form of yoga.

With access to the I Wrote My Own Manual level of subjective responsiveness, take an additional bonus against career adversity and plain ol’ bad luck. You can figure your own way out of just about anything.

A Few Important Points

• You may get the first bonus for free, but the second and third bonuses listed here will require conscious effort for many, if not most, INTJs.
  • The second and third bonuses may be new ideas to you, in which case you have to fight against your introversion / grump factor in order to learn a new thing (extraversion—the concept is something outside of you)
  • Sometimes it’s a bit scary, because it means committing to learning one thing and getting your hands dirty while other opportunities pass you by.
  • Still, bonuses 2 and 3 can be huge multipliers for people like you.
• These bonuses work better if you’re well grounded in social relations in the first place—the people around you are often the ones who need someone else to have read the manual.
  • Fair warning: If you talk down to someone who hasn’t read the manual, you may find any bonuses evaporating before your eyes.
• If you write your own manual on paper, I find it’s a good idea to use pencil for the first few drafts, or get ready for a lot of complete rewrites. :-)

Filed in: Careers /40/ | Thinking /70/ | Relationships /78/

INTJs seem to enjoy becoming experts at stuff. I know I do.

This “expert” thing can come along naturally and even unexpectedly, because just about any learning process yields an “expert” outcome after a while, and we INTJs like our learning.

Also, some of it is showboating. People gape at you, because you knew the right button to push, or whatever, and you try to suppress a smile. Feels good!

Being an expert is also risky. Joining a system (like a team or a business) as an expert can also be viewed as becoming an input to a system. And the better you can prepare for that, the…better.

Many systems can’t handle your expertise.

They may need your expertise, but they can’t handle it.

If you’re really smart in this case, you’ll lay off any criticism and do your best to dive in and help out. Ideally in a light, humorous, non-threatening manner.

Many other systems don’t want need or want your expertise.

If you’re used to presenting yourself as an expert—say, in business environments—interacting with a system like this is a quick way to get yourself labeled “toxic” or “a little much.”

So it’s a good idea to think this one out first. Even if you’re already part of the system.

Still other systems really badly want and need your expertise.

This is where you have to be most careful. New experts and their inputs can easily displace huge numbers of existing and also beneficial inputs.

Let’s say there’s Team A over there, they want and need you. And they manage Team B. And they want and need you, but they want and need you for more specific stuff.

Team A starts to ask you about the general stuff.

If you get into specifics, you can absolutely throw Team B under the bus without realizing it.

That’s why “expert” is a dangerously flawed label, more especially if you take it seriously yourself.

(This applies outside of business, too: As a head of a family, I’ve been re-taught this lesson so many more times than I ever thought I would.)

If you want to become an expert—great. But also: You’re screwed, depending on circumstances, so wear that label very loosely, and observe things as best you can.

Communicating Expertise

One of the takeaways here is that communicating your expertise properly is important:

• Experts tend to communicate their expertise in a fluid manner. They use less hyperbole and exaggeration when they speak about their subject and background.
• Experts are more open-ended. They are less likely to envision or guarantee a specific outcome, since they have experienced many more of the millions of factors that can influence outcomes.
• Experts are typically more open in their communications. They don’t have as much to prove and are less likely to try to railroad other people or shut out competition. This does depend on a lot of different factors, however.
• Experts see communication about their subject as a plastic process. Ideas can be “kicked around” rather than strictly planned and analyzed. While planning and analysis are still important to them, the opposite case, a “just do it” bias toward pure improvisation is not as strong either.

Filed in: People /74/ | Control /110/ | Careers /40/ | Relationships /78/

OK, I have had enough confessionals from you guys for now. LOL.

DANGER. CUIDADO.

TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOURSELF.

You want the sexy feelings to start to fade? Learn to be a lazy, sexy person more often. Metaphorically, make your work day feel more like sexy underwear and less like a hard hat.

(Unnnnless hard hats are your thing)

Experiment: Every time you have to move to do something, even picking up your coffee mug, make a groaning mini-orgasm sound. Like, life is just too much. You read me? Take things really easy. No, don’t make that literal sound at work.

Go lay down, give yourself a break. You are driving yourself crazy.

Set some boundaries.

Work during whatever work hours you designate. Then stop workin’!

You want MORE sexy feelings? Well sure then: Push yourself to plan the end-to-end launch of a business in like, a single day. I guarantee your body will be screaming for that sweet, sensory relief. A recipe for bang.

It’s all this ridiculously stressful stuff. More examples: Pushing yourself to plan out your entire career in a day. Planning the rest of your schooling. Visualizing an entire relationship in a day. Don’t stop until it’s done (whenever that’s supposed to be). All the same—just variants on the bang recipe.

(By the way: Set and forget planning doesn’t work—teach yourself to be an early responder instead)

Should I cheat on my (whoever/whatever)?

…seriously?

Does this make me a bad person, feeling like this?

No.

It makes me a special INTJ though right?

Hahaha! You’d be surprised. You’d be so f-ing surprised.

Filed in: Sensation /40/ | Se /25/ | Feeling /64/

Over the weekend I set up a video wall on my extra monitor. Six movies/TV shows/other random videos are always playing. (What’s random mean? Well, somehow a really boring corporate video from one of my clients got in there, because the software behind the scenes is looking for videos ALL over the place. Still, it was kinda cool—I didn’t realize I had one of them fancy corporate video walls…)

It’s backed by a script (work in progress) that prepares big random playlists and then opens VLC windows playing those playlists.

Here’s a screenshot:

I tried to get a bit fancy but we’re still stuck at version 0.1 for now. VLC seems to have this “new version? Maybe this feature works, maybe it doesn’t” reputation, on which I’m blaming the fact that I couldn’t get RSS overlays to work. But even without RSS feeds showing up on top of my videos, I guess there’s always something interesting goin’ on.

So far it’s worked great. Early this morning I worked really hard for a couple hours, accompanied in part by this lovely BBC Testcard. Something about the ESFP-style wackiness and novelty of it all was motivating.

My use pattern so far is like this: I keep one window at about 70% volume, and about 10% larger than the other windows. Then I keep another two windows at ~20-30% volume, and the rest are muted. If anything, in any window, is boring, I hit the “next track” button in that window. Sometimes I pause things when I run into the house for a bathroom break, because the current set of videos is just too good.

I also bound “Open a random movie in a VLC window” to a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+Super+7. Kinda handy.

Ideas for future improvements include:

• Adding my favorite memes & other images as a separate slideshow window
• Including slideshows of family photos
• Adding some random generation windows, like simulations, fractal image generators, screensaver-type stuff, etc.

The main idea here is novelty, freshness, and frequent change-ups.

BUT could an INTJ shoot this idea down with that natural eye for everything that’s wrong with stuff?

So I thought I’d edit this to include an INTJ friend’s reaction:

I’m perspiring just from reading that.

Yeah, a few notes: First, you definitely can’t pay attention to all the videos that are playing. You have to isolate the one that you like, and then kind of peek over at the others that are playing and anticipate watching them sometime later. (This isolation, by the way, tends to be a favorite activity of the INTJ brain.)

Second, this is an experiment in free energy via sensory stimulation. Like, something motivating and resonant randomly starts playing, and you get the FREE REALESTATE err… free energy from feeling like I LOVE THIS MOVIE or I’M TOTALLY IN THIS MOOD or whatever. Then this opens an emotional door to kicking butt while working through the to-do list and watching a fun movie or TV show or jamming out to a BBC test card.

Think of yourself as having this windmill attached to your brain, but there’s never any wind unless you decide to break out of your solitude and turn on some new music or go for a run, or whatever. In this case we’re actively trying to create wind for the windmill as a background process, and we’re also binding that wind-creation background process to a keyboard shortcut. In this way it becomes easier to randomly trigger good vibes.

Third—of course I mute the whole wall sometimes, or otherwise moderate the master volume, like when things get intense at work. Like anybody would do. It was never really envisioned as an always-on, loud audio stream, but who knows, maybe there’s something to that which could be isolated…hmm….

Filed in: Therapeutic Practice /144/ | Randomness /26/ | Interests /111/ | Energy /120/

Since I just wrote about changing watches and variety being helpful, here are some more things like that:

Here, have some wallpaper

I’ve been making some fractal wallpaper recently. Here’s one, consider it a wacky, explosive teaser until I finish up my Red Station Wallpaper Pack to be released soon:

It reminds me of a breakfast cereal ad. Maybe I should add some milk somehow pouring into the center…

I’ve been changing my wallpaper imagery more frequently, and I like it. What’s weird is, I thought quality was best. So I was a bit nervous to tell my computer, just as an experiment: “just pick any image in my collection, no matter the resolution. And change things out every 25 minutes.”

But no, even with the known quality issue, the quantity factor is still way better than quality on my energy-meter.

Random Sounds

I’m playing with random sounds. Making my computer produce them at random times. So far, I will only say that this has been fun.

I also updated my random-music script. Pressing the Ctrl + Super + Media-Play key combination quickly shuffles up my entire music collection, throws it into a playlist, and pipes it out through QMMP so I can hear sequences like:

• A Jake Kaufman tune
• No Bravery by James Blunt (OMG, the lyrics…phew)
• Balance-toi by Réciprok (no comment)

I mean, there’s no going back from this level of rrrrandom.

I also have the yodeling chorus of John Denver’s Calypso bound to a shortcut key here, but that’s less random and more yodelly.

Text Editor Themes

I practically live in a text editor, so I bake up new themes from time to time, and I’m thinking of ways to speed this up.

I’ve made at least 15 themes for Geany, yet unreleased because they are sloppy AF. But they are something different and again, this counts. I have one that reminds me of Scooby Doo. I call it Inspector X.

I change color schemes about 3-4 times a day and this pace works pretty well. It’s nice to slip into a new color scheme. Something about the sensory-emotive qualities.

Layering Things

I’ve also been layering and mixing this stuff.

It’s weird. But it WORKS.

• Radio playing Top 40 in the background
• A podcast
• WebSDR audio, like some hams talking on 80 meters, or arabic talk radio
• French hip-hop

I’ll turn up, or down, these various inputs to discover different emergent effects, meanwhile changing wallpapers, text editor themes, window themes, fonts, etc.

Where this will lead

Well, it’s all going somewheres. I was going to leave that as “somewhere” but remembered that the entire point is the diversity of outcomes. Fun stuff to think about.

Filed in: Randomness /26/ | Energy /120/

Fictional Batman is just close enough to a real-life human that he can absolutely trigger people. Mostly for good, like “oh wow, I think I could stand a chance at being Batman,” but in the case of people who don’t like superheroes, also for bad.

Definite Non-blog-reader Alex writes,

Not big into the superhero thing, actually. I can’t really lose myself in the fiction, it’s mostly pure cringe for me. Pause for a moment and think of a vigilante in a bat suit. In REAL LIFE.

At best we’d get: link

OK, Alex is a good guy but I have to look into this. We look into things in this house.

Because I’m super good at Batman-style digital forensics, I was able to “hack” into Alex’s image URL and discover the original article.

(I also discovered a way to “hack” (not really!) that URL to produce a comically bad JPG thumbnail using tiny quantities of free server time, but this is child’s play and I have seen much more impressive hacks in my time as a vigilante superhero, like the time I accidentally hacked my own API and produced a novel variety of radioactive emoji.)

Now, to the story-mobile:

“I’ve caught this one for you,” the caped crusader told officers after marching the 27-year-old suspect into Trafalgar House Police Station in the early hours of Monday 25 February – before disappearing back into the night.

“The person who brought the man in was dressed in a full Batman outfit,” said a police spokesperson. “His identity remains unknown.”

Uh, what?

OK Alex, first REAL LIFE detail to share here: Maybe let’s not overlook the fact that he did it. WTF? He actually did it! LOL. The guy delivered a criminal to justice.

Literally all this guy needs to work on now is his costuming and secret identity:

And while police remain mystified as to the identity of the masked man, a local fancy dress shop owner believes she knows who he is.

She added that she knew the customer’s name from his credit card receipt but vowed to keep his true identity a secret.

Seriously, if this is a bad example of Batman in real life, I have to say it’s barely bad. As in, the costume doesn’t fit well. We don’t even know if he guessed that the shop owner would protect his identity! Maybe this was part of the plan!

So…he did it! That’s the story here. I’m shocked and very pleased, as a Batman fan myself.

This is why I always like to look into things. It’s simply too easy to ignore the possibility that some day, society’s gears will mesh just in such a way that real Bat-superheroes are produced.

Hahahaha. I love it!

It’s hilarious that among other things, we probably need to start developing this concept of levels of real-life Batman, because it’s happening:

1. Wearing a bad costume, bringing no one to justice
2. Wearing a good costume, bringing no one to justice
3. Wearing a bad costume, bringing one or more mooks to justice
4. Wearing a good costume, bringing one or more mooks to justice
5. Wearing a good costume, bringing one or more major criminals to justice
6. Wearing a good costume and driving a f*cking amazing vehicle, bringing one or more major criminals to justice

So, a LEVEL THREE BATMAN has happened. PLEASE someone send me a link to a level 4.

I’m going to stop there because my hands are shaking in anticipation. Can you imagine if we broke into the seventh level? Hahahaha! This is hilarious, but in a way that also points at transcendence. Seriously, hilariously amazing.

I need to stop now and try to recall exactly what I ate that is making this all so entertaining, but I believe we accomplished something good here today.

Filed in: Energy /120/ | Goals /52/ | People /74/ | Interests /111/ | Randomness /26/

I blogged about one of my watches before, all excited about how fun it was. I like watches. I love a good ol’ Casio, man.

These days I’m wearing the Casio AE-1400WH quite a bit, because I found one at RURAL-MART for $19 and you bet your boots I know a smart buy when I see one. This is a low-end Casio with tons of features, among which you’ll also find the ability to see the current time on the analog-style time display while you switch through alarm, stopwatch, and timer modes. I always liked that.

The same watch also has five alarms, which is kind of fun to play with. You know what I use those for, besides waking up or remembering to do something?

QUANTIFIED HUMANITY.

I’m guessing you heard the word on the streets and joined the club.

(It’s not too big a deal unless you consistently elevate your own quantification practice, which I think probably also accounts for the difference between viewpoints like “I don’t get why Quantified Self is a big deal” and “holy sh**”)

Anyway, that’s right…I use my Casio alarms to track things! Calories, hydration, protein, whatever. Mostly calories though.

And yeah, there are some issues. For one, it’s impossible to store a number like “175 calories” because your model M1-A1 Improvised Casio Watch Alarm Calorie Counter will go up to 159 before it needs to jump up to 200 calories.

(If you’re hating on that I got news for you, son: I got 99 problems, but counting calories in increments smaller than 50 ain’t one. Also, this little feature can easily help you lose weight by overstating your calories consumed)

Plus here’s another little gem: Every time I change the alarm, it helpfully turns itself on. So I guess it’s possible to starve yourself and end up waking to a Casio alarm at like 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. (100 or 200 calories). In this way, we reward a balanced diet and punish extreme dieting.

Watches, man.

Oh, and if my schedule is in shambles, of course that’s when I notice that I LOVE a good ol’ G-Shock. Because my schedule is in shock and I may literally die from terrible time management. Something like that. But this truth is pretty consistent.

The opposite case: On weekends when all my work has been done for the week, I think, “maybe I’ll get one of those Snoopy watches.” Time for playful weekend scheduling.

(The reconciliation of schedules is generally helpful to a guy like me, just in case this is lost on anyone)

(Parenthetical 5: It does feel pretty clever to notice this stuff, and observe it happening again and again. At the same time, writing it out is kind of embarrassing…so it’s a good thing I have coached enough people to know that EVERYBODY has embarrassing stuff going on, and often the sooner it’s talked out, the better.)

Another thing that happens: If I’m shopping while bored, my ULTRA-contingency-planning process kicks in, which is I’m pretty sure why I bought a solar-powered G-Shock for my birthday recently. Because…it should last until the sun burns up? No, but gosh darnit, it’s solar and I think somehow that will make things easier in the long run.

It hasn’t arrived yet, and it’s nothing fancy, and I also bought it in “box is practically exploded” state to get a nice discount, so we’ll see how things go. But now that my mindset is back in normative mode, I’m pretty sure I my regular non-solar watches will retain their wearability despite the presence of this apocalyptic-times-anticipatin’ monster.

Sometimes I even hop on Aliexpress and buy a HUGE $10 “fitness watch” just for kicks. The build quality is good enough for day-to-day stuff, and a lot of them watches got “good movement” or so a friend tells me.

Also it’s just impossible to get a reasonably-priced “yellow camouflage” watch these days without paying an arm and a leg.

On the cost

I have a few friends who buy $5000 watches, and that’s all they wear. And I have a friend who tells me that he knows celebrities who collect watches that cost $200K and up, and this one time a bunch of those got stolen, or something. Man those guys need some kind of precious scheduling I guess. They’re probably avoiding scheduling out the rest of their lives, something like that. You know? The old man’s gold watch symbol. Time is precious.

Which, it’s all cool if that’s their thing. Personally I find that sensory breadth is way more rewarding to me than sensory depth, so I try to keep the budget low and the collection varied.

Plus I once lost a titanium G-Shock that was worth about as much as my entire collection is worth right now. Losing that watch was not cool at all. And I’ll probably find it in a box someday.

This also brings to mind a time when a friend approached me at a social event and said, “I used to be just like you, buying cheap watches.” Thank god it was really easy to cut that conversation short. Mister Expensive Watch Guy over here. Geez.

Filed in: Interests /111/ | Dieting /18/ | Technology /41/ | Productivity /119/

Here’s a label that deserves some scrutiny: “INTJs are serious.” What does that mean?

You also might have heard someone say: This or that INTJ is too serious. What is too serious? Let’s get into both of these questions.

First, what does it mean to be serious? Here are my observations, separated into four factors:

• First, it means that one has a natural tendency to appraise and compare in a calculated way, a way which also leaves little room for nuance. “I see that I’m falling behind here, and this other person/thing is ahead over here.” Millions of other factors are discounted in order to get at this evaluation grosso modo. The “grosso part” in effect creates a “seriousness lens.” Moderated by time, it may create an “impending seriousness” effect which complicates things further.
• The second factor is what I call a war footing, driven by a need to protect oneself from outside concerns. “I’m going to fight as if this (project/undertaking) is a war. If I win, I get to claim this experience and carry it forward, further displacing scrutiny and building relational capital.”
• The third factor is finality. “I’ll do this once so it doesn’t have to be done again. And there will be no second place, even if just for contingency purposes.” This immediately complicates the question of energy inputs and outputs, requiring a strong commitment and seemingly mandating a painful recovery.
• The fourth factor is applied competence. “I’ll apply the best approach.” This person has studied the masters (see step one) and knows that the master’s work is done at a different level. Therefore, the work must be elevated to this level, in the closing act of seriousness.

I can’t think of a single INTJ I’ve met, and known well, who hasn’t expressed most of that in some way or another. And that’s reflected in a lot of their past experiences.

Think about the way INTJs often relate their past experiences:

• “You see, I used to be the most effective [type of person / job / etc.] in all of [area].”
• “It so happens that I spent 20 years studying [thing].”
• “What I’m about to say comes from doing this [number] times over the last decade.”

(And therefore? Think about what this person will ask of you next: “Listen to me. Understand me. Give my statements some weight. And lay off the criticism”)

What does it mean to carry this seriousness too far? Certainly that could be helpful to know:

• Applying rough appraisals and comparisons where a different, perhaps deeper approach is warranted
• Taking a war footing where a more synergistic, win-win approach would be best, or perhaps even a nurturing or playful footing
• Aggressively reaching for finality and attempting master strokes when a perceptive, long-term, stabilized approach would lead to an easier success
• Applying competence where incompetence or another oblique approach might create better outcomes
• Needlessly pushing / working / deciding, as opposed to waiting / resting / being open-minded
• Needlessly self-sacrificing / dedicating
• Needlessly tying oneself to a specific outcome / committing

Maybe you can start to see blind spots forming. Some examples:

• I was too black-and-white in my appraisal and my comparison / critique was too harsh
• I went to war, when I regret that I didn’t go to play
• I tried to finish the thing off, when we could have kept it open and celebrated it, carrying it forward into other pursuits
• I tried to stay with it, when a looser approach would have been less embarrassing
• I tried to improve myself and master the task…and inadvertently worsened the outcome / raised the stakes for everyone else
• I pushed hard for something that really didn’t merit the hard work
• I sacrificed myself for something that really wasn’t worth it
• I brought a specific outcome into being, but the outcome was simply one acceptable outcome out of many
• I brutally sacrificed my energy for outcomes which I must now defend, or else I’ll feel ashamed

This brings to mind some guidelines:

• If you can continually develop effective ways respond to outside concerns and scrutiny, you may not have to take life so seriously.
• If you can forgive yourself and take up opportunities to retry things, you may not have to take life so seriously.
• If you care less about your “self” and its value as compared to others, you may not have to take life very seriously at all. (this is trickier than many people think, but awareness is huge)
• Some things can be taken seriously, but for fun. That is, you take them seriously, but know you can moderate the seriousness as needed, depending on how much you like the results and outcomes. This may be important to understand for those who have previously taken things too seriously. It also points to the need for an ongoing, emotionally-reflective process.
• If you’re going to be serious about a thing, that thing should be really, really important to you. Otherwise it may be too easy to mistake your own seriousness level for that of others, which could lead to wasted energy and other disasters.
• It’s really important to be able to develop a “feel” for what is important to you. This is not a set-and-forget thing, but will change over time.
• The most seriously-taken things should also be those which can freely demand huge swaths of your time, energy, suffering, and reflection.
• Very few things should really be taken at 100% seriousness.
• The fact that others may have mastered non-seriousness gives you something worthy of study—other tools to consider.
• The fact that still others have found a way to mix serious with non-serious is also worth considering.
• It may be a very good idea to ask if the systems you create, as a serious person, are overly serious. Could such a system be transferred to a less-serious caretaker, for example? Or can the system respond to / account for a change in seriousness?
• Since relationships are also systems, INTJs in relationships would probably do well to evaluate and reconsider their own seriousness, that of their partner, their friends, etc. Not necessarily as an act of criticism, but certainly as a possible target for emulation or as a learning activity.

Filed in: Energy /120/ | Productivity /119/ | Essays /52/